The Met Office's £33 million supercomputer that keeps Britain - and the world - turning... Now try complaining about the forecast
By Simon Lewis
Last updated at 10:00 PM on 13th February 2010
7,500,000,000,000,000. That's the amount of floating-point operations (or calculations) the Met O ffice's supercomputer makes every minute in its quest to forecast the weather. And what thanks does it get? Live reports on the electronic legacy of empire that keeps Britain - and the world - turning
7,500,000,000,000,000。這是氣象辦公室超級電腦中的浮點運算（或計算）數目， 使得每分鐘都在尋求預測天氣。和它得過什麼感謝呢？生動報告那帝國的電子遺產，它保持英國 - 和世界 - 轉動。
The IBM computer is the Met Office's chief weapon in what appears to be a losing battle with British cynicism. Installed in 2008 at a cost of £33 million the IBM system only came into full operational capacity last yearIBM的電腦是氣象辦公室的主要武器，與英國冷嘲熱諷它似乎是一敗仗，成本三千三百萬英鎊在2008年安裝的 IBM系統，只在去年才開始全力推動
When the Sony PlayStation 2 games console was launched in 2000, its computing power was so great it was subject to export restrictions as a supercomputer - rumour had it the FBI investigated a shipment of 4,000 consoles that were being shipped out to Iraq, potentially to be used in missile-guidance systems and in contravention of UN sanctions. It boasted what at the time was the mighty processing power of one gigaflop - that's one billion floating-point operations per second, the standard unit of computer processing.
Things have moved on since then. Today, a typical home PC runs at 7.5 gigaflops. But it still has a long way to go to catch up with the IBM Power 575 supercomputer that hums quietly and endlessly in a vast, cold, cave-like basement outside Exeter.
What it's computing, all day, all night, requires 125,000 gigaflops: more than are utilised in the whole of the UK banking system. But then, if you had to simulate the fluid exchanges of mass and energy between millions of points in the atmosphere - otherwise known as forecasting the weather - you'd want to think pretty deeply about it, too.
The IBM computer is the Met Office's chief weapon in what appears to be a losing battle with British cynicism. In its eternal quest to feed its keepers with the information they need to foretell our fiendishly changeable weather, it consumes more energy than 2,000 homes. Each of the nine nodes (the filing cabinet-sized blocks you see in the picture), weighs a ton and a half, takes up five square metres of floorspace and hosts 32 processor cores.
High-speed switching and data distribution equipment serving the IBM system高速交換和數據分配設備為那IBM系統服務
It has a total of 500,000GB of disk space. In a fire, a mixture of nitrogen and argon would fill the room and stop all combustion within 45 seconds. If that didn't work, there's an identical supercomputer on the other side of the building running on a separate power supply.
And it is a weapon, of sorts. It is connected by wires and ducts and corridors (for security reasons these cannot be photographed) to the Ops Centre, a room two floors above, which in turn is connected to British and allied military bases around the world, to the Cabinet Office, Ministry of Defence, emergency services and ships at sea.
Britain's 'whiteout' in January英國在1月的'白化'
It also provides data not only to all planes in British airspace, but also to every aircraft above 10,000ft in Europe and over 24,000ft in the entire Euro-Asia hemisphere (the United States takes care of the Americas side of the planet, and each system is a back-up if the other goes down). What some perceive as merely an outfit to supply weather data for the end of the news bulletin is, in fact, an MoD operation born of empire.
Installed in 2008 at a cost of £33 million, the IBM system only came into full operational capacity last year, and the increased resolution allows Britain to be mapped to points 1.5km apart instead of 4km apart. There are three more powerful computers in Britain - among them, those used by our intelligence services for codebreaking - but for meteorology, only Japan is known to have a better one.
在2008年安裝和成本3300萬英鎊，那IBM系統去年才開始全面運作，和增加的解像容許英國在 1.5公里外，而不是4公里之外被到點勘測。在英國有3個更強大的電腦 - 其中有那些我們的情報組織用以解碼 - 但給氣象的，只有日本據知是有一部更好的。
'We can't afford for it to be anything less than 99 per cent operational, because of our global commitments,' says director of operations Keith Groves.
'由於我們的全球託付，我們負担不起使它成為任何少於99%的運作，'行動處處長基思富士說。
'They are absolutely crucial to life and limb.'
There are even contingency plans if a plane hits and wipes out both computers. These are secret, but are understood to involve a seven-million gigabyte backup memory.
Security is very tight at the Met Offi ce's headquarters. An incident with the supercomputer is unlikely. But that only transfers the responsibility onto the shoulders of its human operators: 25 forecasters who man the Ops Centre day and night in 12-hour shifts. Lives and multi-billion-pound investments rest on their professionalism. Unsurprisingly, the atmosphere is tense. But not as tense today as it was in early January, at the last 'red-out'.
'We call them red-outs because of the warnings on our computer screens,' says Ops Centre manager Nick Graeme.
'These are severe weather events that only happen once or twice a year. Red means that Cabinet Ministers will be involved. The chief forecaster will have the Prime Minister on the phone, deciding how to allocate national emergency resources on his advice. The last two red-outs were the Cumbrian floods and the deep snow this winter.'
When 40cm of snow fell on Hampshire in one go and temperatures in Scotland dipped below -22C, extra sta ff were drafted in and holidays were cut short to meet the surge in demand for weather information.
Met Office satellite map of the north Atlantic - the colours show air temperatures at 5,000ft氣象辦公室的北大西洋衛星地圖 - 顏色顯示在五千呎的氣溫
Airlines needed to know which airports would be open and whether they needed to de-ice their planes. Local authorities had to know which roads and schools they could keep open and how long their grit would last. Police, ambulance and rescue teams needed accurate forecasts - as did the energy companies cranking out extra gas and power, and the financial markets betting on whether profits would rise or fall as a result. As chaos reigned outside, the Ops Centre's mettle was tested.
So it was not a helpful time for someone, somewhere, to leak the news that the BBC were considering ending their 90-year partnership with the Met O ffice in favour of a cheaper competitor.
The weeks since have seen the Met Offi ce accused of not warning London about the January 13 snowfall; of misleading the entire country about the probability of a 'barbecue summer' last year; even of contributing to climate-change panic with a 'warm bias' in its long-range predictions. Suddenly, John Hirst, the CEO of the Met O ffice, has a fight on his hands.
'We're human, we're bound to be aff ected by criticism,' he says.
'What worries me is the danger of undermining what has to be a deep trust between us and the British public, which we've worked for decades to build up. The BBC have been rolling over our contract since the Fifties, but they decided not to roll it over this time. It's not surprising or irritating that they might look elsewhere and test value for money. But this kind of thing - and we get similar pressure from the Government - certainly acts as an impetus for us to be the best.'
To understand how the Met O ffice became the best, we have to go back to the years when the Royal Navy was becoming the world's most powerful force. In the 18th century John Harrison's marine chronometer made accurate longitude reckonings possible, but just as important were the later achievements of Vice-Admiral Robert Fitzroy, captain of HMS Beagle.
Appointed the first Meteorological Statist To The Board Of Trade in 1854 and charged with gathering weather data at sea, he gave ships' captains instruments and logs, designed barometers to be fixed in every port, set up 15 land observation stations linked by telegraph and brought it all together in charts for what he called 'forecasting the weather'. By 1860 British newspapers were publishing the results daily.
Flash-flooding in Cockermouth, Cumbria, last November去年11月在坎布里亞郡科克茅夫的快閃水災
'The history of the Met Offi ce comes from the need of the Royal Navy to know where the winds blow and where the currents go,' says observations manager Stuart Goldstraw.
'If we could use that to get somewhere half a knot quicker than the French, that was a strategic advantage. There's still a strategic element to observations. In contested areas of the Poles, actually being there is part of the claim to land rights, and scientific endeavour is a very strong justification. We have a scientific station in the Antarctic today.'
We had one on Spitsbergen in the Arctic, until the Nazis sent the Tirpitz to destroy it in 1943. A year after that, the D-Day landings were only possible because Met Offi ce scientists forecast a brief lull in horrendous Channel storms. In 1952 the acquisition of the J Lyons Company paper-tape computer known as LEO enabled the Met O ffice to make its first successful 'numerical' forecast based on the laws of physics (a feat attempted unsuccessfully during World War I by the brilliant British meteorologist Lewis Fry Richardson using pencil and paper).
The Americans were slightly ahead of us using their experimental computer ENIAC, and a weather race was on. Unlike in rocketry (remember Blue Streak?), Britain stayed in the race, adding satellite capability as that came on stream in the Seventies, and our meteorological pre-eminence remains an important projection of British 'soft power' to this day.
They don't look like soldiers, these stolid and slightly tweedy Keiths, Brians and Nicks, but they bear a heavy responsibility (sometimes for every plane on Earth above 24,000ft, if the U.S. weather centre in Kansas goes down) and perform highly technical jobs in a distinctly soldierly manner. They are, after all, still part of the Ministry of Defence, to which they are required to make a 3.5 per cent return of capital; 70 Met O ffice sta ff are actually in uniform, serving in Afghanistan and elsewhere. Many of its observation sites also happen to be in places that were once painted red on the world map: Gibraltar, Cyprus, Ascension Island, St Helena.
The Met Office's Main Operations room英國氣象辦公室的主要操作室
And like war, weather costs money. Although the Met O ffice has been a Trading Fund within the MoD since 1996, five-sixths of its contracts are with the state (£86 million a year for the Public Weather Service, £36 million for defence, £10 million on other Government services and £21 million for climate research). Seeing where that money is spent gives a fascinating insight into how weather forecasting is actually done.
Observation based at land and sea costs the Met O ffice £17 million a year. The most basic assets, not hugely different from those put in place in 1854, are the five or six thousand surface observation sites around the world. These measure temperature, pressure, humidity, wind speed, visibility, precipitation and other raw data, which is beamed to the Met O ffice via the Iridium commercial satellite constellation. Oil rigs also send data - as do ships crossing the oceans, 150 years after Fitzroy decreed it.
After the unforeseen hurricane of 1987, a large investment was made in an arc of moored buoys that give Britain an extra 12 hours' warning of conditions coming in from the Atlantic: one in the Bay of Biscay, one off Brittany, two off the south-west approaches, one to the west of Ireland, one on the north-west approaches and one in the channel between the Faroes and the north of Scotland. These cost around £1.2 million a year to maintain.
Airborne observations come from 500 helium-filled balloons, many on small strategic outposts such as St Helena and Ascension Island. Civil aircraft constantly have to measure weather data for their own safety, and increasingly these are being downloaded in real time to reveal conditions at di fferent altitudes.
幾年前某些議會接受一個較便宜的天氣提供，但在上個月的冰雪中，他們始終要找我們
A couple of years ago some councils accepted a cheaper o ffer' for their weather. But during last month's snow and ice they ended up calling us anyway
Wind profilers are radars pointing straight up at the sky. There is one grid of 144 aerials (known as a 'yagi array') on South Uist in the Hebrides and one in Aberystwyth. Finally, the Met Offi ce pays £25 million a year for its share of EUMETSAT, the European weather satellite programme. Five geostationary satellites cover the entire globe except the Poles. In addition, three 'Polar orbiters' circle the Earth every 90 minutes, covering 45 degrees of longitude each time and mapping the Earth every 12 hours.
All this data goes into the supercomputer. Its atmosphere model is a three-dimensional grid, sliced into 70 layers above ground and 30 layers under the sea. The world's surface is mapped in 40km-square cells, Western Europe and the North Atlantic 12km square and the UK 1.5km square. Knowing the weather conditions (from observations) at each of those points and the laws of physics and fluid dynamics, the computer produces a four-dimensional output, which describes the state of the atmosphere through time.
Importantly, the computer has to approximate some of the starting conditions, because it doesn't have a reading from every one of those millions of grid points. So what the chief forecaster actually looks at is MOGREPS (Met O ffice Global and Regional Ensemble Prediction System), an array of 24 di fferent four-dimensional forecasts, each assuming slightly diff erent starting conditions.
What's known as The Discussion ensues, where he confers with his counterparts in other European and American weather centres to arrive, every six hours, at The Guidance: the most likely forecast for the next three-to-five days. This is then disseminated to his colleagues, including the 20 Met Office employees (such as Carol Kirkwood and John Hammond) who present the weather for the BBC.
So yes, it's complicated and it's costly, but weather is also a valuable resource. And the Met Offi ce sells it: 'Norway, Australia, South Korea, South Africa and increasingly Brazil and India now use our model under licence instead of their own,' says CEO John Hirst.
'Just before Christmas, we won a bid to provide the U.S. Air Force with military weather visualisation systems. I've just made a bid today to provide Nato.'
Like any market though, there's hot competition. The rumoured challenger for the BBC contract is Metra, the commercial wing of the privatised New Zealand weather service that already sells graphics services to the BBC, including the 'swooping' aerial map that some viewers complained made them feel seasick when it was introduced in 2005.
It has already poached contracts with Tesco and Sainsbury's from the Met O ffice. Metra offi cially refuses to comment (despite indications that it leaked the story), but it's understood that it would o ffer to undercut the Met O ffice on price.
Loss of the BBC contract would be humiliating, but not commercially disastrous for the Met O ffice. More pressing is the prospect of belt-tightening in the public sector, since it accounts for the bulk of its £184 million revenue. The Government wants 15 per cent savings across the board. Competitors such as Metra, America's WSI and Europe's MeteoGroup have already taken roughly half the county-level contracts.
'A couple of years ago some councils accepted a cheaper o ffer,' admits commercial business director Phil Johnston, 'but in January's snow and ice they ended up calling us anyway. Do you remember the M11 "white Friday" of January 2003, where the road was not gritted? That council was not actually getting its weather from the Met O ffice. But we still got blamed.'
It's no wonder there's some resentment. It's taken the Met O ffice 150 years to get from barometers and rain-gauges to the cutting edge of 21st-century science and computing. And now, rather than acclaim, its latest £33 million investment has brought it trouble.
It seems the supercomputer (plus 3,000 underwater transmitters floating in the world's oceans) recently enabled the Met Offi ce for the first time to attempt seasonal and even decadal forecasts. To raise awareness, it jazzed up 2009's balance-of-probability seasonal prediction with the memorable phrase, 'odds on for a barbecue summer'. The phrase stuck, it rained almost non-stop and, this being Britain, we blamed the Met Office entirely.
Slightly hurt, Director of Operations Keith Groves points out that seasonal forecasts are currently really for the whole of Western Europe - and most of Europe did have a brilliant summer. Give them another two generations of supercomputer and they'll be on the money.
Of more concern is the charge that the global average temperature forecasts have been running 0.5C too high in recent years: the so-called 'warm bias' that climate-change sceptics see as evidence of a greenist conspiracy.
I ask six separate Met O ffice employees, including Groves, to comment on this, and not one will be drawn. The next day, I receive an email stating that 0.5C is well within the 'observational range'. I wonder why they hadn't just told me that in the first place.
But then it's perhaps not surprising that Met O ffice sta ff should be so reticent to discuss any perceived flaw in their system. Today, an energy company's profits can swing by up to £600,000 a day depending on the accuracy of its weather forecasts. And as more and more governments across the world switch to wind, wave and solar power, this will be magnified many times over: the value of weather forecasting is about to go through the roof.
The Met Offi ce stands to make millions - but only if its competitors don't get there first. And if we want Britain to remain a world leader in at least this one esoteric, but surprisingly important industry, perhaps we should be rooting for them, too.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/moslive/article-1249957/The-Met-Offices-33-million-supercomputer-keeps-Britain--world--turning--Now-try-complaining-forecast.html
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